A couple of weeks ago I received my first royalty statement from my US publisher; this was the first statement I’d received where I could see a volume of ebook sales set against those of hardcover sales (in the period covered, 25% of units sold were ebooks).  The book, The Mistress of Nothing, sold fairly well (for me!) in hardcover and got up into the top of the escalating royalty rate for hardcovers, 15%.  A hardcover copy of my novel at a 15% royalty gives me $3.31 per copy, whereas the ebook at the decent sounding, but actually lousy, royalty of 25% net, gives me $1.92 per copy.  There we have it.  That is the math.  These figures don’t take into consideration the fact that the ebook might have reached readers who would never buy a hardcover, indeed, might have reached readers who no longer frequent bookshops and only read in digital formats.  But even so, it was interesting to see the figures laid out plainly. 

For several years now, publishers have been banging on about how the move to digital costs them money, how there are many extra steps added to the workload when it comes to publishing ebooks alongside bound books.  But publishers are rarely transparent about these extra costs.  S&S’s statement, quoted in Rusch’s article, “Strong growth in the sales of more profitable digital content was offset by lower book sales” is revealing:  more profitable digital content tells writers all we need to know about actual production costs when it comes to ebooks.  Looks like it’s time to get agitated, again. 

It was an enjoyable day, but for me it felt quite significant in that I thought the level of discussion had moved up a peg or two from workshops of this kind I’ve run in the past. 

This group of people was ready to talk, ready to collaborate, ready to think about what it really means to put text on a screen, what the possibilities are for combining text with other media.  I did not discuss publishing, digital publishing, and/or the digitization of books and, these topics did not emerge during the day.  Instead, the focus was firmly on thinking about new ways to tell stories, and how the participants could use technology to tell stories in their creative and working lives as writers, journalists, and editors. 

We collaborated as a group on a googlemap story - you can find it on the Digital Work page of this website. 

I showed a selection of digital stories to get us thinking and talking - those links are over on the Resources page of this website. 

One of the participants, Alexa Radcliffe-Hart, wrote a great blog post describing the day on her blog, Services to Literature.  Alexa is currently immersed in NaNoWriMo, so best of luck to her with that! 

Here is what they propose:

To Respect the Rights of the Creators of Literary Works in Canada:
1.  Copyright legislation shall ensure the protection of intellectual property and appropriate compensation for rightsholders.
2.  Exceptions to copyright shall be minimized.
3. The publisher shall split the net proceeds of ebook sales equally with the author.
4.  The author shall retain all electronic rights not specifically granted to the publisher or producer and shall have approval of any modifications made to the work.
5.  The publisher shall not exercise or sublicense ebook publishing rights without the express authorization of the author.
6.  When a book is out of print in print form, continuing sales in electronic form shall not prevent a rights reversion to the author.
7.  For ebooks, the publisher in its contract shall replace the traditional “out of print” clause that triggers a rights reversion with a sales volume clause (e.g., less than a specified quantity of ebooks sold in a specified number of royalty periods) and/or a finite term of license (e.g., five years).
8.  When rights revert, the publisher shall provide the author with the digital file of the book.
9.  The Public Lending Right Commission shall provide author payments for electronic books and allot additional monies to this end.
10. Libraries shall acquire digital copies of works in their collections only from rightsholders or their licensing agencies.
11. Ebook retailers shall require the rightsholder’s permission for any free preview or download of an electronic work, and the rightsholder shall specify the maximum amount to be made available.
12. Agents, publishers, aggregators, retailers, and libraries shall ensure that works in digital form will be well protected and will not be shared, traded, or sold outside the boundaries authorized by the contract.

I think this is an excellent list of rights and it covers many complex issues succinctly.  There are a few things that seem to me redolent of wishful thinking:  ‘3. The publisher shall spit the net proceeds of ebook sales equally with the author.’  This can happen, and indeed I have had this happen with one of my books, but that publisher was unusually transparent about the costs of producing the book, as well as the cut the retailer would be taking, etc.  6 and 7 are both excellent, but ‘8. When rights revert, the publisher shall provide the author with the digital file of the book’ also seems to me to be… optimistic, not the least because if a publisher has invested in design, layout, etc for an ebook, the question over who owns that digital file is a little murky - obviously the writer owns the text itself, but do they also own the file that the publisher has paid to create? 

‘10. Libraries shall acquire digital copies of works in their collections only from rightsholder or their licensing agencies.’  Paired with 9 and PLR, this should work.  But there’s a larger question about libraries and digital files:  a library system only needs one copy of a digital file, if that file can be accessed across their entire digital network.  Publisher, libraries, and writers still seem to be pretending that a digital file is the same thing as a single copy of a book.  I think this is an area that would benefit from creative thinking. 

I love the idea of a bill of rights for the digital age, and its great to see TWUC taking a well-aimed stab at it. 

He’s not talking about ebooks, which do the job of getting text onto ereaders fairly smoothly.  He is talking about literature, with a capital ‘L’ - Literature - and how it is possible that literature is under threat in an era where publishers become spell-bound by the potential for bells, whistles, and animated audio clips to add ‘value’ to works that a decade ago would have been published as plain old ‘books’. 

It’s a fascinating post, with a few wobbly bits in it, (like where he asserts that text is ‘not platform-dependent’ - it was last time I looked at my collection of medieval scrolls), but the bit that struck me most forcefully was where he writes this: 

‘“Storytelling” is what we do for children. It is the infantilisation of literature. And while there is much of interest in children’s literature and children’s publishing, to emulate it is to debase     literature, and ourselves.’

In the past few years while I’ve been attempting to talk to people about what I see as the vast potential new technologies have to offer to both writers and readers who are interested in thinking about finding new ways to tell stories, I’ve often found myself referring to myself as a ‘storyteller’.  And this never fails to make me feel uneasy.  I’m not a storyteller, if what a storyteller means is someone who is really good at telling stories in any sense of our oral tradition.  In my own life, I don’t tell stories, I’m not an adept raconteur.  What I am is a writer, someone who sits alone most of the time, working on text, crafting text, shaping text, and, hopefully, creating literature.  So I agree with James on this. 

However, I wonder if the term ‘literature’ can be stretched away from the ‘long form prose narrative’ that James is so attached to, that I am also attached to as a writer and a reader.  I consider my own attempts at experimenting with the new technologies to tell stories ‘literature’, in the same way that the books I write are attempts at creating ‘literature’.  But ‘Inanimate Alice’ and ‘Flight Paths’, among other works, are not literature-as-we-know-it.  But they are also not stories with media as additive; they are stories with rich media at their heart. They are more than the sum of their parts - or at least, that’s what I aspire for these works to be. 

One other quibble with James’ excellent blog post.  He states:  ‘no application or television programme is equal to a well-written, long form text.’  Well, I just read ‘One Day’ which many people would argue qualifies as a well-written, long form text.  I enjoyed it, and like everyone else, found it hard to put down.  However, I’d argue that ‘The Sopranos’ and, oh, let’s say, quite possibly ‘Nurse Jackie’, are equal to it in terms of cultural significance and quality.  But that’s where our arguments about what is art, and what isn’t art, sink into the swamp.  So I’ll end there. 

I’m here for the Melbourne Writer’s Festival.  I’ll be doing two events; the first takes place tomorrow and is a collaboration with if:book australia, the good folks who invited me over.  I haven’t met any of them yet, though of course I ‘know’ Kate Eltham and Simon Groth online, and we’ll be meeting up tonight for the first time.  Tomorrow we’ll be running BookCamp Australia, a day-long unconference on the subject(s) of what next for reading and writing.  I’m looking forward to a day of discussion and questions and talk, talk, talk, something that digital book people are always good at. 

On Saturday we’ll be doing a panel, ‘The Connected Book’.  At both events there’ll be people I’ve met online already, including a few educators who work with ‘Inanimate Alice’, so it will be great to put faces to names. 

It’s been great having a few days in Melbourne which strikes me as a fantastically liveable city, full of great bars and cafes and gardens and beaches and cool little shops and art and a multitude of peoples from all over the world - everything a city needs, in fact. 

You can find the other interviews up on the producer Nick Sutton’s audioboo page.

PhDs by Published Works are odd beasts - you take a selection of your own work and attempt to write about your practice in relation to those works.  The fact that I work in the parallel fields of fiction for print and born-digital fiction was useful for me, in that I was able to write an essay that looked at the similarities and differences between these two distinct modes of writing and publishing. 

My plan is to publish the PhD essay online once - if - I get through the Viva examination, which will be toward the end of July.  I’m looking at a few options for how to do that.  I’m interested in PressBooks and hope to talk to them about using their software as a platform for publishing a version of the PhD that will be open to comments and questions.

I think the way I feel now is down to a combination of factors - relief at getting it to the printers combined with anxiety over whether it is good enough; the ongoing stress over the uncertainty over whether or not DMU is going to renew my contract (I’ve been waiting to hear about this for the same amount of time that I’ve been working on the PhD, and time, and my contract, is about to run out); and just plain old nerves.  It’s been a very long time since I submitted work to examiners.  Of course, handing in a book to agents and publishers is a similar process, but somehow the whole thing about academic judgement feels very different.  I am, after all, a drop-out, so of course academic pressure isn’t something I’ve responded well to in the past.  Ha ha! I can hear all my students shouting, Now you know how It Feels!  Well, all sympathy, that’s all I can say. 

Gulp. 

To kick off our project, Andy has been experimenting with the first story from ‘Flight Paths’, ‘Yacub in Dubai’; he’s created an open source version of it that is compatible with many devices and platforms, including iPhone, iPad, and Android, as well as all desktop computers.  This version gets round the problem that we’ve had with Flash not working on certain devices.  Here’s the link: http://labs.dreamingmethods.com/flightpaths/chapter1_open.html

This link to the latest Dreaming Methods newsletter also showcases several of Andy’s other projects, including his own Digital Fiction Boilerplate, which allows creators with some knowledge of HTML and Javascript to create works that are viewable across platforms and devices, including smartphones. 

As well as that, the newsletter provides a link to the Dreaming Methods mobile site. 

All very exciting and, indeed, ground-breaking, developments for our work on ‘Flight Paths’. 

Today’s explosion of capital letters was prompted by the announcement from FutureBook and The Literary Platform that they are co-hosting an event, the FutureBook Innovation Workshop here in London in June.  This is an entirely good thing from two good people, indeed two organisations, who are dedicated to thinking about the future of the book in ways that highlight innovation and experimentation.  The description of the day sounds great:  publishers will get the chance to ‘showcase their recent apps, enhanced e-books and e-books, and share best-practice with fellow publishers. In addition, the conference will provide a platform for publishers to meet with developers, with a “speed-dating” session aimed at putting book professionals in touch with potential digital partners’.  Fantastic.  I want to be there.

Except for one thing - no writers included.  No mention of writers, no mention of writing, no mention of stories.  I can see why this makes sense - this is an industry event aimed at publishers and developers, co-sponsored by FutureBook, which is an off-shoot of The Bookseller, the publishing industry’s main source of news and comment.  This conversation - about the future of publishing, indeed, the future of the book - is one that writers have been largely absent from throughout the past decade.  But this omission is symptomatic to me of the weird division that exists in our bookish world between the makers of content and the sellers of content.  I say ‘weird’ because it never ceases to amaze me how ignorant most writers are about the industry they work so hard to survive in;  that said, if writers are ignorant about the industry, most of us are even more ignorant about digital technologies. 

What would writers do at such an event - pitch their incredibly cool ideas for digital projects at the cohort of publishers and developers present?  Hmm.  Now there’s an event I’d like to attend.  I’ve got this great multi-platform idea - book plus web apps, growing its own interactive reading community…